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Tacitus VfW
Tacitus.jpg|Tacitus, A wandering Samedi|link=Tacitus Audi, vide, tace Life... it passes. As does time. All that lives must at one point wither. And as it withers, it fades away. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, riddles the old tome. And oh, how the riddle pains the aching dead mind. And once it all withers, we remain. The Gravediggers. The Tomb Dwellers. Voudoun. Zombies. Mo vivan. '' ''And how does the chill of the grave cater to its children? It blesses us, and so we rise again, it curses us, and so we never stop walking. The bét, Beast, from within beckons for san, Blood. As we feast on the unsuspecting cattle, paying their dues to the ones who departed away, we feast on that ounce of life that connects to death. '' ''What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be. '' --- A.D. 1791 - Port-au-Prince ''"I have nothing to pay with, but I will gladly bless your denizens, good Sir." '' "Ou pa kabap, here we no believe your bondye, go away!" said the man as he slammed the door in front of my eyes. These poor souls know not the heresy in their faith, instead they see us as devils who take their lives away. The Holy mission has been taking place for a while now, but the results seem to be ever so futile.'' They preach of voudoun and of Loa, the guardians of the living and the dead, and the power they have over them all. For them, it is hard to grasp the concept of one omniscient and omnipotent God, whose Son has place in his Everloving heart to redeem them all for their sin of heresy. '' ''I walk from door to door, preaching gospels and litanies they might understand. Those of forgiveness and clemency. But the resilience of this people is utmostly unnatural. The French are now in the midst of a revolution, and only a handful of the lucky ones managed to escape the clutches of turmoiled motherland, ending up in a God forgotten place such as this one, on Saint Dominigue. '' ''The revolution eats its own children, and as of lately, it turned from the main course to a dessert in the form of an unchristened island. I walk on, and I see a rally of people in what you may call a town square. They speak in Creole, making half of the words jumbled, but I grasp the gist of it. The revolution is about to start on the island of Saint Dominigue, in Port-au-Prince. The natives are angry, and they show it without fear. The French authorities are in a dilemma whether to retreat or stand vigilant among the angry crowd. '' ''As I pass by the crowd, intrigued by their rally, their eyes fall upon me. "Move lespri sou!", they chant in unison. One among them silences them. He seems to have some authority over the crowd. The history will remember the man as Toussaint Louverture, the initiator of the revolution, yet I will carry his name into the grave... and beyond. '' ''"You, the priest of Europe", he speaks to me, in accented French, but no Creole, "You claim our land and our spirits, and because of you, the Gods fall silent." He has dedication behind his words, but my gut tells me the power behind them is more malign than one might at first tend to believe. '' ''"I am but a member of an order sent here to aid your people in turmoil. My God is your God as well, and his everloving heart welcomes you, as your sins are forgotten!" "Sins forgotten," says Louverture, a tall and slender man, with a grim expression on his face. "The only thing forgotten here is who is the REAL owner of this island. It is not the people or gods, but the spirits that never die." I stand confused in front of them, but ready to cite a psalm or a litany to counter his words with love, compassion and forgiveness. Before I come to my senses, I catch a scent of death. The one of rotting corpses and grave. As I cast my sight towards my interlocutor, I see a corpse that walks. I see horror unwind before my very eyes as I see his hollow eyesockets, his rotting flesh and maggots that feed on his festering wounds. I scream out of horror, and what happens next stays but a black memory in my mind. '' ''I wake up, or do I truly, a month later, starved to death, and dead as a corpse can be. The revolution of the living took its toll. '' ''I became the spirit that never dies. --- A.D. 1804 - Cap-Haïtien The Samedi bloodline never truly was united, but we shared the mutual disgust towards the living. Made as an utter antithesis to everything alive, the Samedi served as the Gravediggers of the world of darkness, as maggots left to eat up the festering wounds of this dying world. Oh yes, a dying one. All things strive for one purpose, and that is to die. It all eventually leads to death, and we know it. It took a long time for some of us to realize it, and I must admit I wasn't really the fastest learner in my humble beginnings as a bloodsucking, rotting parasite... I still recall to this day the colour of the sunset sky that fell on Cap-Haïtien, on the eve of my very first Calling. It shone crimson red, and the clouds on the horizon gave it that silky, velvety touch that made it look so much more ominous than the eve was about to be. I knelt at the sandy beach half a mile away from the ill-fated town, my knees buried deep into the sand as the soothing waves washed down on the shore. The water played with my robes as the waves struck to and fro. The reflection of the blood-red sky reflected on the water, and it all seemed as if an ocean of blood caressed me with its macabre sooth. Oh, how I wished that this illusion were greater than what was to become of the town. For years later, I hoped that the red ocean foam that lingered on the shore was my only memory of that night. My creator beckoned me from the hill above the coast, although it took me a couple of moments before noticing him, due to how much I was entranced with the sea that brought me to the island a couple of years ago. And left me there, or what was left of me, at least. I carefully stood up and started marching towards him. The weight of the water that remained on my wet robes slightly troubled me at that point. The issue I had would pale in comparison of what was about to come. He rushed onwards as I arrived on the hill. I could already hear the howling screams in the distance. The plan has been set in motion, and the Calling was about to commence. Through means of revolution, the Samedi bloodline decided to dig themselves out of the dirt and cast off the chains that bound them to their past. I was but a mere fledgling, a meaningless tool for some, here to obey the commands of my murderer, my master, and my creator. Yet I was there when the chains snapped. The pools of blood were splattering across Cap-Haïtien when we arrived. The muffled screams echoed the young night. The revolution took the toll and the land stood ravaged by the atrocities of former African slaves, now turned rulers. Being white was a one-way ticket to gruesomely painful and slow death, as the new authorities, led by one Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had it their way. All white french found on the island were to be slaughtered as animals to provide a message to the Haitian former masters that they were not to be trifled with. The oozing rivers of blood spoke for themselves. The history remembers the massacre of 1804 as a bloodbath. A righteous deliverance of justice. A brutal, yet efficient roar of viciousness of the underestimated African caged beasts. As you see, the background was a bit different. Dessalines was successfully manipulated into enacting the massacre for the righteous cause, yet we needed the spilled European blood for another cause. The heritage of the Samedi bloodline, although secretive to anyone outside the blood, belonged to an ancient clan that the Samedi felt they did not belong to anymore. Even long after Baron Samedi, alleged progenitor and the loving father of the bloodline, came to the island of Saint Dominigue, the shadows of our ancient predecessors still haunted us to that day. When the chains broke. My creator reveled as the oceans of blood soaked his ragged robes. I stood right behind him, watching the frail mortals fall, and their precious blood dripping and flowing through the streets of the doomed town. Soon, the flesh would rot and the earth would devour them. The rains would in time wash the blood stains from the pavements. But the screaming echoes of the spirits of the damned would linger on. If it weren't for us. I Called them for the first time in my unlife, and let the veil shatter before us all as we used them as fuel for our own freedom. 'Tis more than grim to see that their deaths liberated the mortals, but their eternal damnation gave us the salvation we longed for so long. Dozens of Gravediggers were scattered across the shrieking town, letting the fuel flow through them. The sharp blades of mortal knives kept on with the massacre, killing everything that even resembled having white skin. The elderly, the women and the children were not spared, and their shrieks echoed with tremendous power across the town. I knelt on the pavement of a street I hid myself in as I Called. The river of blood soaked my robes as I gazed down the alley, when my eyes turned to the night sky. The streets of blood coloured the sky into crimson red. And from chains we broke, and into chains of freedom we were bound. --- A.D. 1828 - Somewhere in the Mediterranean I listened to the sound of crickets chirping, watching the blood red horizon as the sun set, moments before I rose from the ashes. Waves kept crashing against the cliffs, joining the orchestra of crickets and night birds, waking up my dead, rotten corpse from its slumber. How many years have passed, I wondered. I returned back to Europe as I intended, in a coffin, ready for burial. What I did not have in mind, however, was the fact that I got to see my own death. Death is only the beginning, as the ancient clan proverb goes. My bloodline kept our true lineage secret ever since the first of our kind opened his unholy eyes for the first time, but it never stopped any of us to create legacies of our own. In order to truly die, every mortal connection you had needed to be convinced you have been truly visited by the Reaper. And so I decided to do exactly that. The letter that preceded me had informed my last living relatives of my wishes to be buried in my homeland, after some odd 30 years spent on a remote island. The grieving brothers and sisters gathered in a quaint old graveyard, their bodies dressed in black, their hearts dressed in sadness. I lay in the coffin, the star actor of my own burial. It always made me wonder - that thought of witnessing your own burial. Seeing the people parting with the mortal you. Having the thought cross their mind that you will remain but a memory. Watching them cope with the fact that you have died. Most vampires never get to see the light of the day, but the Gravediggers were a special sort of bloodsuckers. Rotten from within as well as the outside. The ashen vitae that flew through our dessicated corpses was potent enough to endure the blighting curse of sunlight - as long as we were truly dead. They mourned my "untimely" death, praised my "benevolent" missionary work, even though I were thought missing in action for more than twenty years, ever since the revolution on the island. I felt the tears drop down the pitch and on my corpse, as the grieving sisters screamed the prayers to the unforgiving God who took me too early. I'd like to see the surprise on their face upon revealing how God that took me really looked like. Nails put in the coffin, I was lowered down, the priest chanting an old prayer as my grieving family threw flowers and dirt to accompany me on my way down. The rest of the dug-out earth followed, and in a manner of a couple of hours, Lodovico Salvestri was, in the hearts of all who knew him - dead. The following night, Tacitus rose in his place. --- A.D. 1973 - Trieste I was lured, so to speak, after they've found out about my whereabouts in their domain. Trieste being an enclave on its own, as well as the prolonged hand of Venice intrigued me to the point I had to go and see the veil torn asunder myself. Little did I know the wraiths that spoke to me also spoke to the other parties, which would later on cause my untimely demise. The City of Trieste has been ruled for many years by the same family of kindred who, apparently, happen to be my very own cousins in an odd, necrophiliac, incestuous sort of way. The Clan Giovanni had their secrets, some were big, some were small, petty even, usually traded amongst themselves in their "political" attempts to seize power. But there were certain secrets they never wanted to leak out. Not to Camarilla, not to Sabbat, not to ''anyone. The fact that my bloodline even existed was considered a heresy at that time, prior to most of the Samedi rearing their ugly heads and most of them pledging allegiance to the Camarilla - the very ones whom the Giovanni promised not to meddle. But, alas, there were an odd few who defied every sort of authority, yours truly being one of them.'' "Curiosity killed the cat", or in this case, the cat burglar that dug too deep. Again, yours truly. Considering every other clan or bloodline and comparing their inherent weaknesses to the ones of my bloodline, we truly ended up as bottom feeders. "You'll be attracted to art, you'll have to feed on blue blood, you'll be quick to anger and you, Gravediggers... you'll be rotten and addicted to graves." And so, there I was, in the mausoleum of Enrico Giovanni, city graveyard of Trieste. My endeavour was, so to speak, a noble one, to grant a wailing wraith his final fish and destroy the fetter that bound him to this wretched reality. Being naive as usual, as most young necromancers are, I placed my trust in the being from beyond the veil, only later realizing it was luring me to a trap set by its true masters. I give them that, Giovanni can make offers wraiths often can't refuse. Whatever deal they had there got me real good. Long story short, I got trapped due to my own naivety and foolishness. After almost a hundred years of wandering and quest for answers, I was to become an exhibit trapped in, oh the irony, a lonely church on the outskirts of the city. And there you have it, kids, that's how I got to be known as the "Cousin we keep in check"!" A.D. 1996 - Trieste It has been more than twenty years since I've been trapped in this wretched chapel. Bound as servant to my ill-begotten cousins, I toiled and served, like a rat in a cage, a test subject for a fledgling scientist. Foolishness... hmph, more of an overconfidence, megalomania even, to think someone like me could end up without facing consequences after what I have done, in a city like this. The don often came personally to mock me in my demise. The smug look on his face was something I could only dream of ripping apart at that point. He had the bragging rights, the other clanmates could have had only envy for their prodigal son, who managed to trap a Gravedigger, almost entirely on his own. Truth to be told, were it not for the intervention from beyond the Veil, he would not be standing where he is now. Curse the Giovanni and their spectral servants! The life in prison was not as tough as it sounds, however. I was given opportunities to do pass my time. I was brought bodies to experiment on them, corpses I would turn into servants, all under the wicked agreement I was bound to accept, stating that I could never leave the premises. At first I thought the agreement to be a weak cantrip, only only later have I realized that the Don had someone with immense necromantic powers, powerful enough to trap a kindred in a place for infinity. I did, however, have my own outsider. The poor fellow was a thief who planned to rob an already haunted church I was slumbering in. On a very peculiar night, as well. Now, the thief in question was surely in ''grave danger, and the chances for him to remain alive after his robbing attempts were very slim. The fellow managed to break into the back door of the chapel, finding his way to the altar where a validly expensive paraphernalia for masses was placed, hastily stuffing his bag, pockets, socks even with what he could grab with his greasy fingers. He looked dirty, unkempt, with a greasy hair and unclean skin, his teeth needing serious dental care. He was an epitome of hopelessness, looking like that, panicking and breathing heavily in that church.'' It was time to deliver the punchline to this joke of a man. I snuck behind him, carefully positioning myself in a way that he will have to turn to grab the bag he had placed at the other side of the altar. I put on a mask of a small child with doll features, just like the porcelain dolls you could see in old souvenir shops, if they still made those. I couldn't have really known, I've been trapped for a couple of decaded, if you'd excuse me. So there I stood, expecting to scare the hell out of the poor sod, like a cursed child doll, dressed in my lily-white costume and my hair tied in pigtails. And then he turned and saw me. Hardly anything can surprise me nowadays, due to the stuff I have went through with this creep. Instead of screaming his guts out, he ''checked me out, licked his lips and put the golden cup he had been holding back on the altar, and then spoke in Italian: "Oh my goodness, are you lost? Don't worry, daddy is here." ... Mistakes were made, I believe, and my nefarious plan that was born out of boredom was about to become a very complicated story about how the perv had ideas, and I had fangs.'' It didn't take long before he was drooling on the floor, almost unconscious due to the amount of blood I sucked out of him. The Giovanni fed me sparsely, the church was pretty much abandoned, and I believe this guy was the first proper meal I had. Albeit I fed on a perv, vitae was still vitae. I wondered how he managed to break in, however, with all the contraptions the Giovanni set around the perimeters, making it almost impossible for a mortal to even think of breaking in, whether this guy did it without setting anything off. The Giovanni were nowhere to be seen, obviously not alarmed, which meant... I was alone with him. He truly wasn't food sent my way, this guy was here on his own. I fed a bit too much, and the guy seemed to be losing consciousness. I ripped my wrist with my fangs and let him drink a bit, enough to get him hooked. To this day, I cannot really say whether this was the best or the worst thing I have done in my unlife. Federico, as he is called (although I tend to give him various names, ranging from livestock names to R-rated iterations), woke up, half-drunk with my blood, and immediately started to elaborate on his endeavor. "If I may ask, where is that doll? She looked dollicious." I didn't react too much to this, yet instead decided to train the baboon to fetch food on my command, and do things that useful human beings usually do. After some odd twenty years, I managed to get myself a ghoul. Not the brightest shilling, however, but it mattered not, for now I could extend my paws outside the god-forsaken church. A.D. 2016 - Trieste (for the last time) The Giovanni never would have expected of me to do the reverse ritual and entrap one of theirs in my own domain. Such was the fate of one of their newest fledglings who came to visit their Samedi exhibit. The poor pup stood no chance and he lay dead merely a couple of moments after entering the premises of my cage. The Giovanni were, naturally, mad and furious about not being able to reach their cousin, whom they intended to bury and translocate behind the Veil. "Not today", I thought to myself, "or ever, now that we're at it." But even the Giovanni knew how to bargain, and so I set the price on the corpse, looking for the highest bidder. Don's powerful magic was inadequate to pierce the shroud I raised around my cage, so he was forced to think out of the box as well. Buying myself some precious time, I started to work on a plan to get out of this rathole I was forced to live in for all these years. The only thing I needed was to figure out a way to get some of Don's blood. Federico couldn't aid much, but the connection I had recently obtained had his... or hers... ways of procuring resourceful individuals. And so he, or she, did... Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door... A kindred from Zagreb came merely a several weeks later upon my request for aid. An inconspicuous, unsuspecting girl, her blood as potent as a watered-down ale. THIS was the aid that was sent. Very well, I thought to myself, I am a man who likes surprises. As had been obviously seen in my penchant for getting trapped in cages. She hasn't really introduced herself, although I cared not for the name at that point anyway, only looking for a way to get out, willing to offer almost anything, or murder almost anyone. She came with a proposition to buy off the corpse of the Giovanni I trapped inside, which made me think whether she was not quite the aid but rather my opponent's agent. I told her I'd agree for a trade, should she obtain me vitae which contained at least traces of Don of Trieste in it. The confused little girl agreed, even joyfully rushed to do my bidding. To this day I do not know how she did it, but some moments later she was handing me over a vial filled with blood of Don's ghoul, and I gave her the permission to do whatever she'd like with the corpse I safekept. Promising we'd meet again, I bid my farewell to my unlikely savior, and kissed that cage in Trieste goodbye, off to sort out the deal with my dark connection. Once I did, my destination was set. City of Agram, the Black Tyrant's domain. Off to bring some dark tidings, then.